Administrator

The Administrator, or Admin, of a forum is the person with full control over the forum's functions, appearance, and general configuration. This person has access to the Administration Center where they can configure the forum as they wish.

The Administrator can add or remove Permissions, customize the forum's appearance, assign Moderators and other staff, and many more things inside the Administration Center.

Avatar

Avatars are images that members select to represent themselves online. They are shown in profiles and beside every post or personal message. Other members use the avatar to easily identify a member. Commonly avatars are abstract images, photos of celebrities, or pictures of cartoon characters, not a photo of the member.

Administrators use Attachments and Avatars Manager in their Adminstation Center, to can control who can set and change the profile, and whether they can select from a list, upload an image, or link to an offsite avatar. They can set policies on avatar upload file size.

Board

In an SMF forum, Boards are where topics are posted. Boards are displayed on the board index and should be organized into categories to make it easier for viewers. A board that appears inside another board is called a child board. A board with child board is called a parent board. Administrators set who can see and post to the board and set other board options.

Board Index

The Board Index is the central part of the home page of the forum. This is where you will find a listing of all the categories and boards that you are allowed access to. The exact appearance of the Board Index is affected by the options chosen by the administrator, as well as by the theme. For more information, see Board Index

Buddy list

A Buddy List displays all of the members on the forum whom you have added as a “buddy”. This list will also show their online status and contact information if available. If your administrator has enabled the buddy list, you can work with your buddy list from your profile.

Forum

A forum is an online discussion site where participants can hold conversations by posting messages. SMF is forum software. In SMF, the forum contains categories, categories contain boards, boards contain topics, and topics contain a topic post and several reply posts. The terms used to describe how other forum software organizes message topics may be different.

Group moderators

Group Moderators are members that can manage a membergroup. Group moderators have access to the moderation center from where adding and removing members can be carried out. From the moderation center, group moderators can accept and decline requests to join a membergroup (Profile > Group Membership).

Please note that for a member to be able to request membership for a group, that group must be set to request in the membergroup settings.

Although being able to add and remove members, group moderators do not have the ability to change a group's name and online (or display) color. These permissions stay solely with the administrators.

Karma

Karma is an optional feature that shows the popularity of a certain member. The administrator can enable this from core features. When members are allowed, they can Applaud or Smite a member to raise or lower that member's karma.

Member

A member is a person who has registered at a forum. It is usually beneficial for a guest to become a member if they intend to post or use the forum more than once. Members always belong to at least one membergroup.

News

Forum news can be used to display news items on the forum header of every page of the forum. The administrator enables random news line or news fader in the settings of one or more themes, and enters items in the News tab.

Post

A post, is a message posted on a board. It can be a topic post or a reply to a topic post. It is different from a personal message. You can have up to 4,294,967,296 posts on your forum.

SMF default theme

The SMF default theme is the default look-and-feel theme supplied with the SMF installation in the default theme directory. It may be different from the forum default theme. If you change the files in the default theme directory, then you will have something slightly different from the SMF default theme in that directory. This could cause problems when you wish to install modifications or patches. It may be better to leave the SMF default theme alone, create a copy of it, and make customizations to the copy.

Theme

An SMF theme defines the look and feel of your forum. The theme sets the order the various elements appear on the page, what colour they are, and whether there are any interactive elements included. The same forum content might look very different when viewed using a different theme. The administrator installs and manages themes from Themes and Layout. For more information on what goes into a theme and how to create or modify a theme, please see Developing Themes